Hi! I used to use DXVA on XP for PowerDVD 6.
If I remember correctly, Cyberlink had some sort of compatibility chart for video cards.
Either on CD, the help file or on the website (use Wayback Machine).
Maybe you can make use of that chart somehow.

Good luck! 🙂

Current version of DXVAChecker page have lists for Intel, Nvidia and AMD https://bluesky-soft.com/en/DXVAChecker.html
Unfortunately only Vista and above are supported in current version. Versions up to 3.14.0 officially supports XP and above http://web.archive.org/web/20161121103904/htt … XVAChecker.html

For my Galaxy 7300GT it shows:

Thanks but actually the program seems to check an already installed gpu.
The point is to know in advance which one to get for XP to support DXVA 1.0 using (say) mpc

And nVidia support is pretty confusing

For video playback, you want a Geforce 8-series or later, but a 6 or 7 is passable, preferably 7. With the 6-series, the video playback functions vary quite a bit and were not uniform across the product lines. 7 and 8 had PCIe cards converted to AGP with bridge chips, while 6 had native AGP cards. This was because the emerging markets/Asia was reliant on older/existing, less expensive hardware, and they wanted newer cards for gaming and media usage.

Mamba wrote on 2022-09-18, 08:28:

Thanks but actually the program seems to check an already installed gpu.
The point is to know in advance which one to get for XP to support DXVA 1.0 using (say) mpc

And nVidia support is pretty confusing

It depends what type of compression you actually want DXVA to handle. NVIDIA's 6 and 7 series were ok (ish) for MPEG2, but did not have full bitstream decoding for H264.

Windows XP only uses DXVA1, Vista onwards use DXVA2.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-09-18, 10:23:

For video playback, you want a Geforce 8-series or later, but a 6 or 7 is passable, preferably 7. With the 6-series, the video playback functions vary quite a bit and were not uniform across the product lines. 7 and 8 had PCIe cards converted to AGP with bridge chips, while 6 had native AGP cards. This was because the emerging markets/Asia was reliant on older/existing, less expensive hardware, and they wanted newer cards for gaming and media usage.

The GF8 GPU had a memory leak issue, though.
GF7 was very limited in terms of gaming, I remember.
GF5/Geforce FX.. Oh my god! - But it had a dedicated 2D unit, still, which is honorable.
Personally, I'd get a GF9 type GPU rather. The leaking bug, was still there, technically, but somewhat tamed.

Or I'd get an S3. The S3 PCIe card I had in late 2000 was awesome for DVD playback.
The IDC algorithms etc. in silicon were amazing.
Hm. It was an S3 UniChrome series, I believe?

I will use XP and a Nvidia card.
Need to know if it is possible to decode h264.

I know nv40 had a design flaw.
Do a 7600gt will support?

There is no Nvidia 8xxx or 9xxx with agp.

I am not asking about gaming

You would need to dig up one of the quirky AGP Radeon HD cards to get full H.264 accel. Everything else on AGP has at best partial decoding of it. You may also need to have a CPU with SSE2 support.

Search the forum. There have been discussions of this before.

Radeon HD cannot do h264 on XP afaik

HD 4000 series has full h264 acceleration. DXVA though is nothing more than DVD acceleration. DXVA 2 is probably what youre asking about. AFAIK any NV card later than a geforce 440MX has it. ATI cards have had DVD acceleration since rage 128 provided by a separate chip and any radeon card has DXVA. Theres no H264 AGP nvidia card. Otherwise you need at least PCI-express card with Fermi arc if you want Nvidia.

Broadcom made a h264 decoder card, that I adapted to a mini pci-e wireless card to a pci-e to PCI adapter once and I got h264 working on a pentium 3 once. Maybe something worth looking into.

Good thought Jo22 but couldn't find anything on their archive website about the requirements for the h.264 add-on 🙁 Maybe was included in a text with the add-on like you mentioned.
The DXVA Checker site has a chart, here is the nVidia chart: https://bluesky-soft.com/en/dxvac/deviceInfo/ … der/nvidia.html
and the AMD / ATI chart: https://bluesky-soft.com/en/dxvac/deviceInfo/ … ecoder/amd.html
Too bad they do not list the driver version of the early vid card types...

After a little research and curiosity found that XP natively does not support DXVA, the adapter and driver both must support DXVA as well as the Video player.
MS released a patch for XP WMP10 that allowed DXVA playback if the hardware supported it.
https://www.neowin.net/news/fix-directx-video … or-wmp10-on-xp/

VLC has supported DXVA since the beginning but not for XP (from their wiki):
"Since VLC version 1.1.0, DirectX Video Acceleration (DxVA) is supported in DxVA 2.0. It is available in Windows Vista (or Windows 2008) or any later Windows version; it is not available for Windows XP/2003 (and never will be). "
https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding/

But that does not appear to be true !! My XP box with VLC does list Auto, DXVA and Disable under the Preference tab > Codec part for H.264. Not sure if it actually works better enabled but found that contrary to their wiki...
Also Media Player Classic Home Cinema utilizes DXVA if hardware supports it afaik

Hell…

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/7600gt-agp-d … eration.915497/

Mamba wrote on 2022-09-19, 04:45:

Hell…

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/7600gt-agp-d … eration.915497/

Hmm according to that PDF my AGP 6200 does have it (H.264 Decode Acceleration) as well as my 6600GT and 7800GS.
This topic is interesting and am not concerned with VC-1/WMV support (Microsoft's VC-1 proprietary video format...") on older vid cards.
Bluray use h.264 (not VC-1) as well as many video capture devices and MKV/MP4 formats.....

Horun wrote on 2022-09-20, 02:36:

Hmm according to that PDF my AGP 6200 does have it (H.264 Decode Acceleration) as well as my 6600GT and 7800GS. This topic is in […]
Show full quote

Mamba wrote on 2022-09-19, 04:45:

Hell…

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/7600gt-agp-d … eration.915497/

Hmm according to that PDF my AGP 6200 does have it (H.264 Decode Acceleration) as well as my 6600GT and 7800GS.
This topic is interesting and am not concerned with VC-1/WMV support (Microsoft's VC-1 proprietary video format...") on older vid cards.
Bluray use h.264 (not VC-1) as well as many video capture devices and MKV/MP4 formats.....

Plenty of older BDs are VC-1 encoded. Warner and Universal used VC-1 on most of their discs until around 2011 or 2012. Then they switched over to H.264.

Sony and Fox actually used MPEG-friggin-2 on some of their first BDs! Play those on a large enough screen, and you'll definitely see the codec choke a little on tricky scenes. Thankfully, they switched to H.264 fairly early on, around 2007 IIRC.

There is a big difference between partial (IDCT) and full (bitstream/VLD) H264 decoding support. The former was barely supported by any software (because it barely made a difference to the CPU load when decoding) while the latter had widespread support.

Here is a look at the old hardware acceleration available with X1800 and GF7 cards. They used a Cyberlink decoder. ATI shows a 60% CPU load, NVIDIA 80% on a Athlon 64 single core 2.4 GHz. It also sounds like the X1800 and X1900 are the only ATI D3D9 cards that are capable of even that level of acceleration. Lower models are very limited.
https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/4143- … -update/?page=3

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-09-20, 03:48:

Plenty of older BDs are VC-1 encoded. Warner and Universal used VC-1 on most of their discs until around 2011 or 2012. Then they switched over to H.264.

Sony and Fox actually used MPEG-friggin-2 on some of their first BDs! Play those on a large enough screen, and you'll definitely see the codec choke a little on tricky scenes. Thankfully, they switched to H.264 fairly early on, around 2007 IIRC.

Thanks for the info, rarely ran in to VC1 back in the day when doing unmentionable things ;p

Warlord wrote on 2022-09-19, 01:10:

Broadcom made a h264 decoder card, that I adapted to a mini pci-e wireless card to a pci-e to PCI adapter once and I got h264 working on a pentium 3 once. Maybe something worth looking into.

I second that. Saw that board once, wasn't bad.
It was sought after by owners of nettops and Asus EeePC at the time.
The board was in Mini PCIe or mSATA form factor, if memory serves.
Some users even thought about installing it in Mini PCIe to PCIe adapters.

This ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom_Crystal_HD
You can buy them on ebay for as little as $10.